Monday, June 15, 2020

Was Game of Thrones' ending so bad that it killed off other fantasy projects slated for movies and television?

A little over a year ago, Game of Thrones ended. Before it's final season, it was a cultural phenomenon that had millions of people talking about how it would end. When it did finally end, it was a huge dud, and there were lots of people that poured hate down upon it. My own opinion? Yeah...it was bad...like really awful. However, I was hoping that it's success would indicate that we'd see other fantasy projects on film and on television.

Now that it's a year later...I don't see anything. No one talks about Game of Thrones anymore (for obvious reasons). It is in the dustbin of history. But no one talks about anything else either. Whatever happened to that Amazon Lord of the Rings series? Nada...nothing. I heard there was going to be something done with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Nowadays, there's just crickets. There are no fantasy movies I can think of that are being greenlit. I'd heard rumors that maybe people were thinking of revisiting the Narnia stories, but again I've heard nothing more than that.

If Game of Thrones did irreparable harm to the fantasy genre (as it appears in film in any form) for the next fifty years, well...that kinda sucks. But I get it. A crash and burn of epic proportions tends to harm everything around it pretty badly. I just wish that the showrunners had realized that they had more of a responsibility in doing a good job with their intellectual property than just making a product for HBO. They should have thought about the lasting impact a terrible landing was going to make on the entire genre as a whole. But people don't tend to plan for the future very well. I guess that's why we can't have good things.

5 comments:

  1. People think short term. Hopefully it didn't kill off all other fantasy series. Although right now, almost everything is on hold.

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  2. A lot of the people watching the last few seasons of Game of Thrones weren't fantasy fans; they were the kind of "fans" who just glom on to whatever show is popular at the moment: MASH, Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc. As soon as the show is gone they're on to the next thing. The other problem is of course that fantasy is expensive to produce, just like sci-fi. HBO and its owners are investing a lot of money in this HBO Max thing and "the Snyder Cut" so that takes up resources that might be used for other projects.

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  3. Ah, but fantasy has always been a tough sell. I don't think Game of Thrones was the only reason things fell by the wayside. If anything, that showed the powers that fantasy could sell. But they're not used to seeing what they don't want to see, so they got distracted by other things. (It's like female-centric movies. One does well, they're surprised. Then the flurry of maybe. Nothing happens. Then another one comes out...)

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  4. I guess we'll see.
    The problem is that a lot of these things are based on buzz, and Martin's books had the buzz to get the show made, but, now, there's no buzz about... anything.

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  5. I have watched a bit of the Shannara series and have been severely underwhelmed by it.
    But I am liking Discovery!

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